The story reminds me of the 1994 Jodie Foster movie, "Nell." I have tried to find if that was based on a true story but haven't been able to. These are very rare cases and this was most likely a hoax from the start.

The rarity of actual wild boy occurrences is evidence of how social and dependent we are as a species. Six billion of us all over the globe - you would expect more of it to happen, but you will never find a bee or an ant living alone either. The difference is that we are actually capable of it like a feral cat or more rarely a dog. Why aren't there feral people? The closest thing was the 19th century mountain men.

I'm almost feral in the social sphere, but I do live indoors most nights.

Petunia, may be the family didn't want to identify him. I believe they breathed a collective sigh of relief when he's gone. Who wants to acknowledge a 20 years old who has no jobs, who doesn't want to grow up, whose silly hoax is so obvious?

That's the give away. Even after camping in the woods for one day, that's impossible.

I still love the fact that a lot of medieval TV shows and movies (Game of Thrones, even) toss accuracy to the wind when it comes to the appearance of teeth. It makes suspension of disbelief even harder to achieve.

What happened here is that the German's very goofy notions of "privacy" got in the way of solving this. This was an open case for a year, in which this faker lived off German social services, and the police only just now released a picture because ordinarily "privacy" laws prevented them from publicizing the case. Makes me wonder about missing children cases, if privacy laws prevent "have you seen me?" pictures?

I thought he was living out some sort of overblown fantasy narrative, like some goth kids are wont to do today, or like those SCA losers in my day. But it turns out he's nothing but a garden variety con artist -- that surprised me.

The linguist was right, he's not a native English speaker, but many Dutch speak beautiful English, some with passable BBC accents. I'd say the expert made an educated guess based on cultural or vocabulary clues.